CPJ member and treasurer, Daniel O'Rourke, wrote the following column, "Iraq -- 'Checkin’ out of Heartbreak Hotel'," for the Dunkirk Observer, which was published on October 13, 2005.

Country music lyrics have a way of expressing our primal passions simply and simplistically. Recently, I heard Lee Greenwood singing his unabashedly patriotic “God Bless the U S A.” Despite the uncritical patriotism in that song, however, the nation is increasingly divided on the Iraq war. If that division came with country music sound tracks, the war supporters would be singing of President Bush with Tammy Wynette,

“But if you love him you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
Stand by your man
Stand by your man.”

On the other hand, I imagine the opponents to the war belting out “I’m Checkin’ out of Heartbreak Hotel” with Merryl Streep in the movie “Postcards from the Edge.”

“Cause I’m leaving here tonight,
I packed my bags and paid my bill,
I’m checkin’ out of heartbreak hotel.”

As the war and the pacification of Iraq continue to deteriorate, there is a great temptation to compare it to Vietnam.  Some with Yogi Berra are claiming it’s deja vu all over again.  The comparison, however, is only partly true. There are many similarities and much dissimilarity.

In both instances our government entered the war with great confidence and pride that we would easily win.  We would “nail the coon skin to the wall,” boasted Lyndon Johnson.  Or “we will be welcomed as liberators in the street of Baghdad” (Dick Cheney).  Or as a deluded Paul Wolflowitz fantasized “welcomed with flowers.” Our government’s arrogance in both wars was colossal and self-destructive bringing needless slaughter and suffering.

The justification for the intensification of the war in Vietnam, like the initial justification for the preemptive war in Iraq, was based on misinformation spun by the administrations to convince congress and the American public.  The clear hindsight of history shows us that the incident in Lyndon Johnson’s Bay of Tonkin was as manufactured as George W. Bush’s even more insidious claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them.

In both wars our government, intoxicated by the political rhetoric of the day, deceived itself.  Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, now says clearly that Vietnam was a civil war, which the United States misread and never should have entered.  We were caught up in the accepted domino theory that if Vietnam fell to the communists then the rest of Asia would follow.  South Vietnam did fall; the rest of Asia did not follow.  The current political myth is that Iraq will be a model democracy for the rest of the Middle East.  For reasons, which are more and more apparent as Iraq
slips toward civil war, that rationale is as flawed as the domino theory of the Vietnam era.

Another parallel, as the current polls attest, is that the American public is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war in Iraq as it did with Vietnam. Moreover, as a Vietnam veteran told me the Vietnam experience has lowered the bar on the number of American deaths the public is willing to tolerate. But there, I think, the parallels end.
There are two huge differences.

The biggest difference is Bush’s Orwellian manipulation of 9/11 linking it without evidence to Iraq.  Many Americans frightened by the death and destruction of fellow citizens on our own soil were deliberately led to believe that attacking Iraq would make us safer. The opposite has happened, but that falsified Iraqi connection with 9/11 is the major difference in the perception of much of the public.

Unless you are a pure pacifist the military response against Bin Laden and Afghanistan after 9/11 was appropriate.  The preemptive war against Iraq, on the other hand, was an ethical and political disaster.  It would have been just as mindless if after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor had we retaliated against the Soviet Union.

The biggest difference, however, is that a voluntary army, including many civilian reservists, is fighting the Iraq war.  Vietnam, on the other hand, had an army composed greatly of draftees. Unlike Vietnam the nation has given widespread support to our troops who were sent into this war in insufficient numbers to control Iraq and with insufficient armor to protect themselves. I do not know anyone who does not support our troops. This administration has treated them dreadfully.

Despite the continuing disaster in Iraq, many American are reluctant even to entertain the possibility that nineteen hundred American troops could have died in vain.

On public television a few weeks ago Margaret Warner interviewed four parents who had lost sons in Iraq.  One of them was Paul Schroeder from Cleveland, Ohio whose son Marine Corporal Auggie Schroeder was killed when a roadside bomb destroyed his lightly armored vehicle.

Paul Schroeder and the three other parents agreed that the soldiers who died in Iraq died heroes because they followed their consciences, served their country and did their duty.  He and the others did not think their sons had died in vain, but Schroeder said bluntly that their sons had died NEEDLESSLY.

The initial Rumsfeld policy of deploying only 138,000 troops, Schroeder said, was insufficient to secure the country and as a result Iraq is still in turmoil and troops and Iraqi civilians continue to be killed. To sacrifice for your country is noble, but to die for a failed Pentagon policy is needless.

Schroeder thinks it's time that the Pentagon admit its initial mistake and send in more troops to secure Iraq, but if there is not the political will for that, he said, we should pull the troops out now.

That grieving father is right. To save American and uncounted Iraqi lives, the nation should be “checkin’ out of heartbreak hotel.”